POINT PLEASANT BEACH — For some 60 years, the Point Pleasant Beach town council opened its meetings by reciting the Lord’s Prayer and performing the sign of the cross.

Trying to head off a lawsuit, it recently altered its practice to allow council members to rotate in opening meetings with a prayer of his or her choice.

But that wasn’t enough for a Superior Court judge, who today told the council to stop its praying. And this has the borough mayor asking why the state Legislature can open with an appeal for divine guidance, but Point Pleasant Beach cannot.

The borough has been opening meetings with the Lord’s Prayer since the late 1940s or early 1950s, said Mayor Vincent Barrella. Barrella, an attorney, said he didn’t think it was a problem to offer a short prayer before beginning a government session.

"If the (New Jersey) Assembly and the Senate can open their session with an invocation, I don’t see why a municipality should not be able to do the same thing," Barrella said yesterday.

Since 1846, the state Legislature has opened its sessions with prayer. The state Senate and Assembly hear invocations from visiting clergy members, rotating among different faiths. According to tradition, the invocations should not address religion or politics, though past recitations have included mentions of Jesus, "The God of Abraham" and "The God of Muhammad," and have been delivered by Roman Catholic and Orthodox priests, rabbis, imams, a Hindu swami, as well as by bishops and ministers from Protestant churches.

Concerning Point Pleasant Beach, Superior Court Judge Vincent Grasso issued an emergency injunction yesterday, preventing the council from implementing its rotating-prayer policy adopted in October. The judge acted on a lawsuit brought by a borough resident and the American Civil Liberties Union.

Any policy that permits the use of explicitly sectarian prayer is in violation of the New Jersey state constitution, said Jeanne LoCicero, deputy director of the ACLU of New Jersey, which filed a lawsuit along with resident Sharon Cadalzo.

Cadalzo, a former borough employee, said that since she began attending council meetings several years ago, she had opted to sit down and not participate during the prayer, which has long been associated with Christianity. Other residents noticed, singled her out and made her feel "truly uncomfortable," she said yesterday.

"I was just sick to my stomach when attending council meetings," Cadalzo said. "Using that prayer is not inclusive and I have been opposed to it for a long time."

Cadalzo, 57, is Jewish and an active member of her Brick-based synagogue. As a town employee she helped manage a grant from the New Jersey Department of Community Affairs, and she was named as the borough’s volunteer of the year in 2009.

Cadalzo and the ACLU first filed a lawsuit in September, and the council offered to open meetings with a moment of silence instead, according to Cadalzo.

But at both meetings where the council attempted the moment of silence, on Sept. 21 and Oct. 19, protesters disrupted the silence by loudly reciting the Lord’s Prayer, Cadalzo said, adding that on neither day did any council member or town employee attempt to silence the protesters. The council approved the rotating-prayer policy at its October meeting, and Cadalzo and the ACLU refiled the lawsuit in November.

The next step for Point Pleasant Beach will be to come up with a new policy that is acceptable to all parties, said Kevin Riordan, an attorney for the borough. The council will have several options, he said, including accepting the no-prayer injunction, reconsidering the moment of silence, or re-writing the policy to exclude all sectarian and denominational prayer.

But no matter the outcome, the council still needs to work on making sure all residents feel included, Cadalzo said.